Cron job too complicated, just buy one of those timed light controllers to power off the server every night for an hour.

Convince one of your Asian friends to run a mirror and sync everything to them if possible.

Here is a somewhat simplified explanation

When you are registering a domain you are essentially just creating a NS record:

mydomain.com NS <nameserver ip or name>

Then when a resolver is asked a question like what is the A record for myserver.com it goes and asks the tld server (.com) what is the NS record for mydomain.com. the tld then responds with the nameserver ip. Then the resolver will query the nameserver directly for the A record of mydomain.com

In practice there is a ton of caching going on here, but that’s the broad strokes

It costs cloudflare basically nothing to host free customers ( if you start to push real traffic you will get an instant call from sales). By being a free customer you are basically a guinea pig for all new features as they are rolled out globally.

I like that they incorporated a flared base